Rockets center Asik joins list of NBA big men to feel hack attack

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Wilt Chamberlain, who scored 100 points in one game, was a popular target to be fouled. (AP photo)

Fouling the big guy, as the Oklahoma City Thunder did to Rockets center Omer Asik during Game 5 of the first-round playoff series, is a time-honored tactic that predates Shaquille O’Neal and his linear descendent, Dwight Howard, now with the Los Angeles Lakers.

As with most outsized tactics in the NBA, it dates to the greatest game-changer of them all, Wilt Chamberlain, whose inability to shoot free throws altered basketball in much the same fashion as his ability to dominate the paint changed rules in that area.

Chamberlain connected on 51.1 percent of his 11,862 career free throws, so he missed more shots from the line than Rockets coach Kevin McHale attempted (4,554) during his Hall of Fame career.

Chamberlain’s accuracy for the most part declined as his career progressed, so it was not uncommon for opponents to chase him down for deliberate fouls.

A sound strategy

That led in 1967 to the NBA rule stipulating that for off-the-ball fouls in the final two minutes, the player gets foul shots and his team keeps possession of the ball.

But it didn’t prevent Dallas Mavericks coach Don Nelson from reviving the practice in the late 1990s in games prior to the two-minute mark against the Chicago Bulls’ Dennis Rodman and against O’Neal. The latter’s name inspired the tactic’s nickname: Hack-a-Shaq.

Today, it is used most frequently against Howard, who has a career 57.7 percent accuracy from the line. The Rockets used Hack-a-Howard in a 107-105 win over the Lakers in December, when Kelvin Sampson filled in for McHale.

Howard was 3-of-8 from the line, and the slow pace kept Kobe Bryant from getting into the flow late in the game.

Similarly, Sampson thought fouling Asik was a good tactic by the Thunder in Game 5. After scoring 37 points in the third quarter, the Rockets had just 20 in the fourth, 11 of them on Asik free throws.

“You have to take the pulse of the game,” Sampson said. “It’s strictly a feel thing. When we did it to Dwight, he made one out of two, one out of two, then 0-for-2, so you do it again. I thought it was really smart for them to do it to us (against Asik), because it really caught us by surprise. Nobody had done it to us all year.”

The Rockets were up by 10 points with 6:35 to play when Thunder coach Scott Brooks went into what McHale described as “Hack-a-Turk” mode, a reference to Asik’s Turkish ancestry.

Asik hit one of two shots on four occasions and two of two on four occasions, so the Rockets never came up empty even though Oklahoma City cut the lead to six at one point.

“(Asik) made his shots,” Brooks said. “He hadn’t done that consistently all year, but he did that last game. I tip my hat off to him.”

Asik was 120-of-248 from the line in his first two years with the Bulls, so the Rockets made his free-throw shooting a top priority when he signed with the team.

Among his tutors was former Rockets general manager and assistant coach Carroll Dawson, whose past pupils in assorted aspects of big-man technique included Hakeem Olajuwon and Yao Ming.

“He had been playing about 12 minutes a game, and we told him that if you want to be in the game in the fourth quarter, we have to start with free-throw shooting,” Dawson said. “He would take the ball back over his head and was leading with his forearm. He was kind of throwing the ball, really. We changed his release to where it’s more off his fingertips with a softer touch.”

A work in progress

Asik remains a work in progress. He shot 56.2 percent from the line during the 2012-13 regular season, up from 45.6 percent the year before. Dawson thinks he can improve to 70 percent.

“Kevin and (assistant coaches) J.B. Bickerstaff and Dean Cooper worked with him, so it wasn’t just me,” Dawson said. “But he’s a great student. He’s worked as hard as Yao and Olajuwon worked, and he’s made himself into a very solid NBA player.

“It takes a while to get better from the line. Even after you can make 90 out of a 100 during practice, it’s different during a game because of the way the nervous system works. He still has to get that under control. But he has the mechanics.”